If you try to pass off other people’s content as your own, especially for financial gain, they can sue you under copyright law. Likewise, if someone copies a piece of web
content you published on your website and re-publishes it on their website without your expressed permission, they are violating your copyright on that web content and you
can ask them to take it down or sue them if they do not comply.

Public Domain

The public domain refers to content (books, movies, etc.) that literally belongs to the public, so anyone can freely copy and distribute it without penalty. Content can only
find itself in the public domain if:

It was published before 1923 (typically not very useful for current web content).

The author expressly gave the content to the public domain by writing explicit instructions that literally gives the work to the public domain.

It was published and copyrighted before 1989 and the copyright expired (once again, this would only apply to certain works published between 1923 and 1989 and dependent
on the publishing date and when the author died).

Copyright Violations are Crimes

If you violate the copyright laws on other people’s content you could face criminal charges, or most likely civil charges through a lawsuit. Civil court means a judge or
jury looks at the evidence and decides whose sto1ry is more credible. Criminal rights like “innocent until proven guilty” do not apply. Remember OJ Simpson? A criminal
court found him not guilty of murder but a civil trial still found him responsible for those murders he apparently didn’t commit and ordered him to pay millions of
dollars to the victims’ families.

Don’t steal content and you won’t get sued. It’s that simple.

How Copyright Laws Affect Your Website

Copyright laws are intended to help authors control the content they created. This means protecting it against people who want to use it for their own purposes,
and allowing the author to decide how, where, and when they publish what they have created. If you have created a piece of content and want to allow someone else to
repost it, that’s fine, you just need to give them your written permission.

If you want to publish something that has been written by someone else, all you need to do is get their written permission. If they are not the author they cannot
give you permission so getting the OK from a third party still means you are violating copyright laws.

Web Content and Plagiarism

Some of the same principles of copyright law overlap into issues of plagiarism. Unless you have a contract with a writer that proves they are willing to ghost write
content for you (meaning writing without getting credit), you cannot publish someone else’s content under your own name, that is stealing. Likewise, if you quote someone
in an article, paraphrase a news story, or copy any more than 5 consecutive words from a text without citing the source, you are committing plagiarism.

The best way to protect yourself is to always write ORIGINAL web content for your website and cite all of your sources. Search engines penalize duplicate content anyway,
so reposting an article or blog that already appears online will actually hurt your website’s search engine rankings, not help it.
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